When I meet him in the studio in the weeks before his solo exhibition at Tiziana Di Caro’s gallery, Stanislao Di Giugno shows me the works – 31, in actual fact – he created in the previous few months: a series of paintings in only two sizes (40 x 30 and …), as if this size limitation amplified the energy released from the repetition and internal variation of each piece, with shapes and colors recurring among pieces. I look, and the first thing that comes to mind is a sentence by Matisse stating that the difference between two canvases is the same as the one that occurs on a chessboard between the various phases of a game: “the physiognomy of the chessboard changes continuously during the game but the intentions of the players who move the pieces remain the same.”
Now that I’m writing, however, I think back to the title of this exhibition, 31 fughe e alcuni dettagli [31 fugues and a few details]. I think of Di Giugno’s work as totally abstract, yet the word ‘detail’ (maybe I have read too many books by Daniel Arasse, the last art historian who could talk about detail as the narrative potential of an image) makes me think of figurative painting. But what exactly is a detail? A simple magnification activated by the gaze? A point in the representation that retains a certain degree of autonomy, resisting the whole? A fragment that does not agree with the rest of the image, complicating it or deviating its meaning? An area in which the formal structure of a painting cracks, collapses, gets stuck in non-resolution and discrepancy? And what are the details in Stanislao Di Giugno’s abstract works?
The idea of fugue contained in the title, on the other hand, refers to one of the most complex techniques in music composition: based on counterpoint, the fugue superimposes different melodic lines, and keeps restating the main theme through digressions and returns, repetitions and continuous recombinations.
Di Giugno’s canvases have jagged surfaces, and are articulated through a “score” of balances and contrasts between areas that subdivide it (in most cases into squares, rectangles or trapezoids) outlining a sort of uneven grid; between different and contiguous tones that contrast or relaunch each other, and between similar tones that recall each other and repeat themselves, but with significantly different tonal qualities, in different points of the surface; among a few more assertive hatchings – algid, monochromatic, bright – that cover and configure, there are others that are more hazy, opaque, tactile, within which the signs and movements of the hand and brush are visible; others are yet even more indefinite, more akin to a glazing constantly undergoing revision and rethinking, allowing us to catch a glimpse of the underlying layers.
To this jagged score, crossed by slits of color that subdivide it, corresponds a mobile and indistinct temporality, a below and an above that may not coincide with the “before” and “after” of the creation process of the image: a tone that seems to spread over the entire surface, for example, and rising “from below” as a margin along the edges of the painting; to a hatching that is designed as a background, may not correspond a “before” of the painting; just as the areas and bands of color that seem to close and cover, cut and redefine, the image may not necessarily have to do with the painter’s final engagement with the canvas.
There is also, in many of Di Giugno’s paintings, a particular way of articulating the relationship between figure (an abstract figure, I mean) and background, as a balance of interchangeable and equivalent forces. In a work such as Fuga n. … [Fugue no. …], the figure can translate into a combination of shapes with bright, sleek colors, which, due to a progression of tones that fade into each other, appear as slightly cylindrical, volumetric (or vaguely mechanical, like those in Leger’s paintings) and seem to break away from a background which, colored in a flamboyant red, offsets their outward movement. Also red is a drawing of the surface of Fuga n. …, a flat-colored band that runs along the edges and the diagonal, enclosing into a narrow second plane the same volumetric, cylindrical shapes, which in other works are free to expand. Instead, that of Fuga n. … is an atmospheric foreground which seems to move towards the observer, with a background that becomes a figure, like an expanding cloud or smoke. This atmospheric dimension is also found in other works, where the sleek hatchings may appear as clear skies, or skies with a glowing haze that fades into a deep blue, whose contiguity with areas of brown, earthy tones gives the impression of bringing out in the paintings fragments of landscapes, with bright and sharp horizon lines (I get a similar impression from Painting for cold light, a 2019 piece where the image seems stuck between a landscape and pure abstraction).
The same atmospheric dimension is ultimately representative of a movement within all the artist’s works, that of hatchings that move back and forth, expand and contract as in breathing (of color and surface), suggesting one of the most evident qualities found in the works of some great abstract expressionists (the color field, specifically), for which figure and background were complementary movements, rather than areas/parts of the painting.
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In the studio, as I look at the works, I reflect on what I find significantly changed in Di Giugno’s new paintings. A greater palette – in addition to the bright tones typical of his past work there are others – bright, opaque, pastel colors/tints – capable of enlivening the image, enriching it with new notes, and complicating the relationship with reality, which has always flowed like an undercurrent in the artist’s abstract paintings. For years, in fact, the artist has collected (as a preparatory practice aimed at defining his palette) fragments of mechanical, technological objects, pages of glossy magazines whose common trait was a particular quality of their surfaces, the kind of sleekness of which I have spoken from the beginning of this text.
In Saving Beauty, an essay from a few years ago, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han noted that sleekness “is the trademark of our time. This is what Jeff Koons’ sculptures, the iPhone and Brazilian hair removal have in common. Why do we find beautiful today what appears sleek? Sleekness does not hurt, nor does it offer any resistance. Sleekness provides a (pleasant) sensation not linked to any depth.” The book, which identifies the survival of some reserves of beauty in the digital age, contrasts the aesthetics of sleekness with “an aesthetic of veiling and wounding. Beauty is necessarily an appearance. There is an inherent opacity to it. Hiding, delaying, distracting are space-time strategies of beauty. Beautiful is the object in its veil, in its veiling, in its hiding place.”
Stanislao Di Giugno’s works made in recent years seem to me to have a common trait: they introduce the forms of sleekness into a territory in which those same forms, undergoing a particular pressure, are skinned, wounded, worn out and crumpled. In the collages made in 2010, for example, the shimmering surface of magazine pages was folded many times up to shattering the structure of the paper, which was then stained with dark-toned brushstrokes and sprays. In a recent series, I can’t stop searching for myself, the subject of the paintings was instead the grid resulting from the artist’s Google image search on his own name, a work on the self-portrait that became a surface where the glowing images on the screen translated into (almost) monochromatic black or white squares and rectangles, vibrant and at the same time ghostly.
In the new works included in this exhibition, sleekness is a fragment among fragments – a detail, indeed – of an image that cannot unfold in the organic form of a fractured and unstable, intermittent and contrasted surface. In fact, Di Giugno’s new paintings seem supported by two contrasting forces: one that tends to unify and connect, experiencing the impossibility to do so; and an opposing one that inevitably pushes the painter to focus on details – the details of painting, which can coincide with the desire to use up a color or take on the appearance of uncertain strokes and single brushstrokes – which open up to the possibility of the unsolved and the provisional, suspending the image in a perpetual unfinished.